


all is fair in love and war

by mangohaz



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Based on my new found love of country music, Gen, Grace also lives, Grace has enough
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-18
Updated: 2018-08-18
Packaged: 2019-06-29 01:04:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15718731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mangohaz/pseuds/mangohaz
Summary: grace survives and thomas comes to regret not mourning his wife





	all is fair in love and war

**Author's Note:**

> i was listening to two black cadillacs by carrie underwood and then i saw a gifset of grace and i thought................ hm.................... and so this was born. as always, written in the middle of the night so excuse the mess, i'll have a clean up in the cold light of day. sorry for the lack of lizzie, i thought it would be out of character for her to inflict anything physical upon the man

Grace was all dressed up in black. Black dress, black veil, black heels. 

 

The only accent of colour across her entire ensemble was the rather striking shade of blood red painted immaculately across her plump lips. In the few spare moments she shared with only herself over the course of that morning, the red lips were stretched across her cheeks into a wide smile, a smile that bore teeth. As she looked into the mirror it almost seemed as though the glossed crimson was the remnants of her cannibalistic meal. As though she had decided to still bare the shreds of battle across her face to the funeral as a final show of dominance over the man.

 

_ All is fair in love and war _

 

He’d told her that often, when he’d come home dressed head to toe in the blood of another man, or when she’d bump into some sobbing ex-mother stumbling her way out of his office with a check in her pocket. He always wore that subtle little smile when explaining away whatever ungodly action he had done that day, something he didn’t try hard to hide from her, the darkness sitting behind his eyes when it came to the suffering of others for his personal gain. 

 

It had been something that Grace had detested from the day she set eyes on him, that entitlement. Half of her had thought, when she was young and naïve, that it was just the seeping over classism ingrained in her from her upper class upbringing that set off the bells in her head when she saw him for the first time, a working man in a position of extreme power within his community. As time went on, she came to learn that those bells were far more the response of her woman’s intuition than any other prejudice that existed within her mind. 

 

And those bells had only got louder as Charlie had grown older, as she’d made the decision to marry him despite all that told her  _ NO _ , they didn’t stop when she’d survived the two gunshots to her torso that had rendered her infertile and deeply self conscious of the scars that now lay embedded in her skin. He noticed when now she refused to be topless in his presence, taking Charlie into another room whenever the boy cried for milk and changing in her rooms before coming to rest in their shared bed. She’d flinch away when he touched her, even once the pain wore away and the scars healed to the best of their ability, she would slink to the other side of the bed in the evenings, claiming she needed to be ready to get up if Charlie began to cry, before falling asleep as quick as she could to avoid anymore curious fingers creeping their way in her direction. 

 

And as a result, the man began looking for that intimacy elsewhere. 

 

Namely in the bed and arms of a young, Gypsy woman who had found a place working in the shop. Her name was Kezia and she had long, unbrushed curls that were black as the night sky, with eyes to match; the rest of her features subtle and deceptively babyfaced with permanently rosey-pink cheeks flushed against high cheekbones. She’d been blessed with these nimble fingers that could grip a gun like second nature, a body just the right side of pudgy and a mind that could outrun Churchill’s. And when Grace had met the girl, she knew she was perfect. Perfect for more than one reason, perfect to grasp her husbands attention and steal him away whenever Grace didn’t want him and perfect to be molded into her brilliant and beautiful ticket out of the marriage.

 

It had taken Grace less than two weeks to have real assurance that they had become bedfellows, Polly had bumped into him rushing out of Artillery Square with the suit he had worn to the Garrison the night previous still hanging off his back, far more rumpled and almost sodden with the whiskey and rum the man would drink to reach that same oblivion the man had felt in the war. Polly hadn’t thought about that, though, as she watched her nephew sneak back toward the out-of-place car he’d parked out of sight down a back alley the night previous under some expectation that he would be staying the night instead of heading home to his wife and son.

 

Grace had waited by the phone that morning, awaiting the news from Polly when she had woken to find her husband still missing. And the call had come, just before she was about to head into the kitchens to find some breakfast the phone had begun to ring and she had grabbed it before Mary had been able to bring her the reciever, shooting the woman a deathly look that turned the woman around and out of the room without any other words. 

 

“It’s happened, Grace.”

 

And she’d tried to sound dejected, like this was news that hurt her down to her very soul and not as though she had a smile etched on her face, “It was, well, it was only a matter of time, I suppose.”

 

“I’m sorry, dear.” and Grace almost felt sorry for what she was going to do and the effect it would have on her aunt-in-law. Then she remembered how complicit the woman was in the behaviour of her bastard nephew and the smile that had dropped ever so slightly came back with a vengeance.

 

A few moments later the phone line went dead and Grace carried on her venture to the kitchen, this time with a far more malicious frame of mind. 

 

That evening she found a way to summon the girl to the Shelby house still sitting in their name on Watery Lane, the girl knocking on the door at 9 on the dot with that school-girl nervousness that had set her apart in the office and assured her relationship to her husband in Grace’s mind. She’d sat on the sofa as Grace had instructed with a innocent distrust in her eyes, wringing her fingers together as she waited for whatever Grace was going to say. The woman in question skirting around the unused kitchen getting a teapot and some cakes she’d gone to the bakery specially for, also to make the girl sweat a little, if just for fun, and she supposed that was probably some of her husband’s evil rubbing off on her, but she wasn’t to worry.

 

“I need you to help me kill my husband.”

 

And the devilry sparked in those dark eyes. And Grace knew she’d found the right one. 

It was important that the act was to be undetectable, or at least untraceable back to the pair of them. They were lucky in that respect due to his unpopularity with a vast amount of people that far removed them from the runnings of those most likely to end his life. Grace wanted to keep her house, her son and her money while Kezia wanted to be able to venture to America in search of an education and perhaps an oil tycoon. Grace had liked her spark, her search for something better than the shit reeking streets of Birmingham or the endless Irish greenery that existed without substance. The girl had been enthusiastic after the initial shock, she knew of a plant,  _ wolfsbane  _ she had called it, that women in her camp would use if they needed to rid themselves of a violent husband. It was the calling card of a beaten woman, she had told Grace, only a gram of the thing would paralyze him straight into a heart attack. 

 

Grace had merely nodded and by the end of the week, the deed was done. 

 

People supposed it only made sense that the man would die young, ever realistic about his own mortality, especially after the war. All the stress he put himself through, no surprise he had a heart attack, people would whisper in the streets, watching as the Shelbys rushed themselves round and round trying to stabilize the business in the aftermath. The younger women in the street would joke and giggle about how lucky the man was to have made it home from their beds to die; none of them suspected any foul play. Not even the cooks who had been given the evening off on the day of the event, Grace insisting that she wanted to cook her beloved husband a nice meal to reconcile, they just thought it was terribly  _ sad _ that she was to lose a man she loved so dearly, so suddenly in the way she did. 

 

With him frothing at the mouth, shaking and crying out in pain on the bed beside her.

 

She had been asleep at the time, as everyone believed with nothing to indicate anything different. There were no witnesses to the fact that the woman had sat up and watched over him as he had laid, unable to move, in the king sized bed and looked back at her in the first show of scencire  _ fear  _ that she’d ever seen from the man in all the time she had known him. There was no evidence that she had taunted him with his inevitable death, watched him with a vacant glare as he had begun to shake and as his heart had began to hammer. Absolutely no proof that she had waited until he fell completely silent and still to settle down in her usual spot and fall into the first peaceful sleep she’d had since being shoot through the heart. 

 

Kezia showed up to the lavish funeral _late_ , seated herself on the back pew by the door with the same black veil hanging over her features; the same red lipstick on her lips. People had looked at her with a face of disgust, supposing that she had come this way to taunt Grace with her relationship with the deceased. Only when Grace had seen her she had been almost unable to conceal her joy. The disgusting, sickly sweet  _ joy _ that had enveloped and wrapped itself around her figure since the night of the man’s passing. Polly passed off her little smile directed toward the teenager as smugness,  _ that girl _ might have won a battle when she’d taken him home and shagged him, but Grace had won the war when she took all his money, business and property. 

 

Grace had stayed, stood at the helm of the newly built Shelby mausoleum until almost the strike of 9 with the moon moving into her eye line to watch over her while she refused to look back at the building behind her.  The thing was quite beautiful, a true show of his wealth in a way he would of liked. Grace detested it.

 

Almost like a vision of her imagination the girl had arrived at her side, veil now resting on her hair, a big bag held on her arm, the other hand dug deeply into the pocket of her coat in some feigned protection against the harsh winter air still lingering in the February air.

 

“You off then?”

 

“Yeah, boat leaves in a couple hours.”

 

“I see great things for you, dear.”

 

That childish dazzle of excitement in her eyes appeared in the exact same way it had when Grace had suggested killing her husband together, only kinder this time.

 

“Yes,” and she paused, pushing off the concrete of her husbands resting place and turning to face the girl, “it’s terribly sad you won’t be able to achieve them.” and from her handbag Grace pulled a gun, aiming it at the girl and pulling the trigger. 

 

And no one but Grace could be blamed for Grace's mistake of not checking the girl over when she had arrived, for if she had looked closer upon the girls appearance she would have noticed the sharp outline of a Colt revolver sitting in her concealed hand, the thing was probably Tom’s, she always knew  _ that lot _ to have sticky fingers and she had visited the house more than once over the week that it had taken to prepare their murder. But, Grace hadn’t looked at the girl at all really and only had herself to blame when her own, singular shot was preempted by three coursing down the barrel toward her and lodging inside her, one to the lung, one to the heart and a final bit of lead sticking itself just below her voice box. 

 

The wall of the mausoleum was painted with her blood as it burst from her, seeping across the concrete and leaving a Grace-shaped print over the engraved ‘Shelby’ golden lettering. 

 

Birmingham’s police force would search far and wide for whomever had desecrated the woman in such a way. Kezia had taken the gun from her hand’s before she’d left her, had wiped the thing off and thrown it into the sea on her way to New York, the only clue she’d left being the cursive lettering traced onto some Shelby Company Inc. paper, blue ink spelling out a final thought for the lost generation of the Shelby family.

  
_ All is fair in love and war _


End file.
